the swedish keyboard layout does not work as printed on the physical keyboard

[Roland Ronquist]

Binary package hint: language-pack-sv

please forgive me, I may be barking at the wrong three (package): language-pack-sv and language-pack-sv-base looks like the obvious choices to me; but this may be something hidden deep in the soul of linux:

Due to national pride all common operating systems has chosen to have two different keyboard layouts for respectively Sweden and Finland even though there are no difference in the physical layout of the keyboards delivered to this two different countries. With Linux, regardless of distribution, for at least the last 10 years, the Swedish layout has not been working properly, neither on the console or in X.
The easy workaround has been chosing "Finnish" instead. But since Ubuntu is labeled "for human beings" I tried being human yesterday (when installing edgy eft on the third machine using edgy in my home) and chosed Swedish, and it still does not work properly.

On Swedish keyboards (and Finnish since they are the same), the alt key on the right side of the space-bar is labeled "Alt Gr" and is used to get "special characters" like:
< > |
Unfortunately, the Swedish layout is lacking this facility which renders it useless when interacting with a comman prompt, or for doing programming in most programming languages.

I do not have the slightest clue how normal persons do to solve this problem, most people I know of are either using the Finnish layout or the US; in the later case they are of course suffering problem with entering our national characters ÅÄÖ.

I am willing to help out describing exactly what is expected from a Swedish keyboard, but the obvious fix is to copy the finnish layout files for the console and for X and get rid of the problem without any work.

Sorry if I complained at the wrong package, but I am not so well versed in the exact layout of the language support in Ubuntu.

/roland.

[Roland Ronquist (roland-ronquist)]

sorry, I have been fooling around a little bit with synaptics, it seems like xkb-data could be another likely origin for this problem; as I said I am not so well versed in the actual package layout of the Ubuntu system since I am only a mere (and happy) user :-)

/r.

[Roland Ronquist (roland-ronquist)]

For your information, IBM says this about the Swedish and
Finnish keyboards that they have been selling for ages:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/keyboards/KBD285.jsp
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/keyboards/KBD153.jsp

[Roland Ronquist (roland-ronquist)]

My brother installed Feisty and he got no problems
with his keyboard, but I am not sure if he selected
Swedish or if he autodetected the keyboard.
In the later case you will end up with "Finnish".

[Roland Ronquist (roland-ronquist)]

well, as I am now running Feisty on 3 machines, all with Swedish keyboard selected,
I can now tell that my brother is right: it finally works!

The keyboard works as described both when using X11 and the console interface.
No need for configuring "Finnish" any more :-)

[Daniel Nylander (yeager)]

Not a bug.